Bo Made It measured what it costs to push an e-paper display far past its normal refresh rate, in a video published on YouTube. The test board is the Waveshare ESP32-S3-ePaper, running a custom display driver and a Game Boy emulator at 30 frames per second.

The video breaks the power draw down by state: idle, emulation, and full gameplay with the display updating continuously. E-paper is usually chosen because it draws almost nothing between updates, so updating it 30 times a second inverts the usual reason for picking it.

The other question is whether the panel survives. Bo Made It ran the display at 30 FPS for about 20 hours straight to see if constant updates leave any permanent marks on it, then reported the results. The driver and emulator are published as a project called InkBoy, and an earlier video covers how the driver itself works.

See the video below and content on GitHub.